2011-02-03

Sponsoredwhips.com is a scam: Follow-up

So the scammer has followed up, and tried to link back to more scammy content this morning. Twice.

Thankfully, Blogger spam detection has worked, because both comments have been moderated without my involvement before I even got up and found this notification in my in-box.

tom has left a new comment on your post "Sponsoredwhips.com is a scam":So A company that writes proposals and has been around for 10+ years you are calling a scam? where is your proof??? You prolly are mad you cant afford their fee and you wanna bash them! unless you you have more "proof" than a bunch of forums were everyone can voice opinions good and bad let me know cuz i found these good reviews: [redacted. A list of links to PR and fake quotes and testimonials follows, as you can see in the screen shot above].

I checked out most of the links in the email and there were a few press announcements on low-caliber news services among them as well as several "testimonials" on car forums made by users who have also happened to join the forum on the date of their first and only post. You guessed right, the inaugural post would be the one about how great the company is.

When I click on the name "tom" in the moderation console I get this profile on Blogger:

And the blog link leads to more fake testimonials.

Now I want to spend some time on the content of the comment.

The opening flame bait is kinda cute: "You prolly are mad you cant afford their fee and you wanna bash them!" Real classy. And not effective at all in discrediting my report, because nowhere did I say that the price was too high, but rather the value prop was fishy.

The follow up to that is even more of a logical fallacy: "unless you you have more "proof" than a bunch of forums were everyone can voice opinions good and bad." Of course I understand, Tom that you are upset with people posting their opinions on forums where they are free to share their opinions, whether good or bad, but sadly, this is how the Internet works. If you scam people, they will post about it.